In a wireless multiple-access network, multiple source nodes (users) may deliver information to a sink node (e.g., a wireless network access point) through a common wireless channel. Each source node may encode its message into one or multiple packets and may transmit these packets over successive timeslots (e.g., sequentially). Transmissions may start at the beginning of a timeslot, and the timeslots may be long enough to complete the transmission of a packet.
Collisions and/or interferences can occur when more than one user transmits in the same timeslot. Traditional approaches for resolving collision include successive interference cancellation (SIC) and multi-user decoding (MUD). More recent approaches, called network-coded multiple access (NCMA), utilize both physical-layer network coding (PNC) and multiuser decoders at the physical layer to obtain linear combinations of the packets simultaneously transmitted in each timeslot. A PNC decoder can successfully recover linear combinations of the packets when the traditional MUD fails.
A typical goal of a multiple-access network is to recover the original (e.g., unencoded) messages of the users, rather than just the linear combinations of the transmitted packets among different users. Message decoding is hence required by NCMA to recover the original messages of the users. Conventional message encoding approaches include Reed-Solomon codes and uniform random linear codes. However, such approaches can result in a corresponding message decoding process that is inefficient, ineffective and/or has undesirable side effects or other drawbacks with respect to at least one significant use case (e.g., the message decoding process may have an impractically high computational complexity).
Embodiments of the invention are directed toward solving these and other problems individually and collectively.